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Monday, November 1, 2010

Roundtables are professional practice, not informal but can be innovative

The roundtables are intended to be fairly "professional." So think ahead of time how you would do whatever you intend to do in a professional situation. They aren't classroom informal -- but they can be professional in ways that are intended to seriously move what counts as professional in smart, savvy ways

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visualizing some trans knowledges

Erica Rutherford's artwork (click image for link)

EPISTEMOLOGY IS THE SITE FROM WHICH WE PAY ATTENTION TO OUR OWN STORIES, WONDERING: where they came from? if they belong to us or we to them? how they mean differently to others? what would happen if they got tweaked by us or somehow shifted outside our control? which possible worlds they assume? how they get made in greater and greater detail? what sorts of powers they enable or disable? and what they assume about communication, sociality, flourishing, assemblage and infrastructure?

We will start off the class with two amazing storytellers: Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, who, for several years, have collaborated in a trans media, trans worlding set of practices of connection. Tsing’s mushrooms allow us to glimpse fungal maneuvers that include us and our knowledges in travels we begin to follow out, while Haraway’s seed bag for terraforming asks us to open up our stories to relentless diversity and urgent troubles.

From there we will work with our materials and each other, with honor, as instantiating and embodying some of the most exciting thinkers, thinking moments, thoughts of consequence, and hopes for “symbiogenetic counterpoint.”

Sensitizing, feeling, and laboring with materialities helps us acquire new body parts, new companions, new outlooks, as well as offering tools for reexamining pasts, critique itself, and processes for unlearning. Women’s Studies hosts its own reweavings – first warping technologies, bodies, power, agencies, then weaving communities, practices, and transdisciplinary knowledges. AND WE ARE THERE!

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About Me

I am Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). My Ph.D. is from the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with interdisciplinary scholarship located at a juncture of feminist technoscience studies, intersectional digital cultures and media studies, and LGBT Studies. I have published two books, Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. women's movements (Indiana, 1994) and Networked Reenactments: Stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell (Duke, 2011) and am now working on
Attaching, for Climate Change: a sympoiesis of media, and Demonstrations and Experiments: Quaker women at the origins of modern Science.